UX/UI Design: Foundations to Practice · The Design Process
Adapting the Process to a Small Team
A founder or small team without a dedicated design department cannot run the full Double Diamond process the way a large organization might, and adapting the underlying discipline to real constraints matters more than following every step formally.
The genuine value in the Double Diamond is not in running formal workshops or producing polished deliverables at each phase; it is in the underlying discipline of genuinely separating understanding the problem from generating solutions from committing to and refining one, a discipline a small team can practice informally, in a notebook or a quick conversation, without needing the formal apparatus larger organizations sometimes build around the same underlying process.
- The genuine value in the Double Diamond is the underlying discipline of separating problem understanding, solution generation, and commitment, not formal workshops or deliverables.
- A small team can compress each phase considerably while still preserving the actual discipline, rather than skipping a phase entirely under the excuse of moving fast.
- Genuine compression (doing a phase quickly but honestly) differs meaningfully from skipping a phase while calling an assumption by that phase's name.
- A solo founder's divergent thinking can quietly collapse into variations on the same idea, since everyone shares the same assumptions, which outside perspective can counteract.